Steve Milloy

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Our air is clean and safe. Our water (with the limited exception of spots like Flint, Michigan) is clean and safe. So the task ahead then is to keep the environment clean and safe and to make improvements where it makes sense — versus spending inordinate sums senselessly returning the environment to Garden of Eden status.

The open-borders crowd has enlisted the help of the greens to stop a potential President Donald Trump’s wall. The title of a “news” article in the British science journal Nature says it all: “Trump’s border-wall pledge threatens delicate desert ecosystems.”

Not only did the EPA essentially invent the notion that PM2.5 kills, it has spent almost $600 million commissioning “scientific” research to prop up the claim. This has paid off for the regulation-happy EPA, as its PM2.5 claims have been instrumental in implementing President Obama’s so-called “war on coal.”

While VW cheated in rigging its engines, that cheating could have had no discernible impact on air quality anywhere. According to EPA, annual emissions of NOx from all sources are currently about 16 million tons annually. In the worst case, VW’s emissions cheating possibly put only another 40,000 tons of NOx into the air annually — not even a significant digit on the 16 million-ton figure.

If he lives up to his campaign rhetoric, a President Donald Trump would be a nightmare for the Environmental Protection Agency, radical environmentalism and the mandate- and subsidy-dependent “green” energy racket.

Many important issues are getting short shrift this tabloid election year. A vital economic one is energy. So I was pleased to hear that energy, particularly with respect to Obama’s war on coal, is a priority for at least one of the GOP candidates for Wyoming’s only seat in the House of Representatives: Liz Cheney.

President Obama is spending three days in India this week. A UK statistician has estimated that India’s polluted air will shorten Obama life by six hours. Is this true? Nope. It’s just another example of how stupid EPA air pollution science is.

Secretary of State John Kerry made an astounding confession today at the COP-21 climate conference in Paris: Emissions cuts by the U.S. and other industrialized nations will make no difference to global climate, he said.

U.S. taxpayers have already spent about $200 billion over the last 20 or so years chasing the CO2-free energy fantasy. The only result has been the stark realization that, with the exception of hydropower, CO2-free energies simply cannot compete on an affordable and reliable basis with coal, oil and natural gas. Obama doesn’t seem to know that “renewable” energy is only as renewable as the government mandates and heavy taxpayer subsidies on which they rely.

MIT researchers are claiming that Volkswagen’s diesel emissions shenanigans have killed 60 unidentified Americans. They further claim that unless VW fixes the emissions problem by the end of 2016, another 130 unidentified people will bite the dust. This is all nonsense.

At the end of September, Youngstown State University announced an upcoming November event with “Nobel Prize winner Michael Mann,” a Penn State professor and inventor of the infamous hockey (hokey?) stick graph. Michael Mann did not, in fact, win the Nobel Prize. Mann has, on multiple occasions, falsely claimed to be a Nobelist, including on the jacket of one of his books and in litigation with pundit Mark Steyn.

The quality of baked goods and processed foods is slated to take a hit over the next few years, since the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has decided that trans fats will be phased out of the foods we enjoy. But a new study has exposed the trans fat worry as junk science-based.

There is no question that Volkswagen should be in trouble for intentionally rigging its diesel engines to skirt U.S. emissions requirements. But EPA’s own diesel exhaust wrongs put VW’s in the shade. The EPA has for years quietly conducted flagrantly illegal scientific experiments in which diesel exhaust was pumped into the lungs of sick people and senior citizens.

I disagree with (euphemism alert) “liberals” all the time. But it has never occurred to me to attempt to silence them, jail them or worse. Too bad they can’t say the same thing. Twenty climate alarmist “scientists” wrote to President Obama this week requesting that the Department of Justice investigate climate skeptics under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act — a law intended for the prosecution of actual organized crime rings like the Mafia.

EPA issued its so-called Clean Power Plan last August. Under the plan, carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants are to be reduced 32 percent by the year 2030. Because the rule would have a negligible impact on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and, hence, no discernible impact on global climate or weather, EPA tried to bolster the rule by claiming it would prevent up 6,600 “premature” deaths and 90,000 asthma cases per year. Knowing that the relatively miniscule reductions in carbon dioxide from coal plants wouldn’t have any impact on global climate — even if it were true that global climate was super-sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels — EPA decided to fabricate its health claims.

The hike is supposed to be the high point of this week’s trip to Alaska, undertaken for the purpose of dramatizing global warming. The media pitch is that Exit Glacier has been rapidly retreating for decades because of global warming. Sadly for Obama’s play acting, though, the National Park Service previously reported that Exit Glacier has been exiting since at least the early 1800s — before the Industrial Revolution even got underway.

Since financial conflict of interest standards are often enforced like a one-way street and are subject to easy misinterpretation, the solution is to eliminate and replace them with scientific data and open debate. A scientist’s financial backing is not nearly as important as the quality of his research, which can best be judged by the efforts by others to replicate his results. This requires access to his raw data, a full description of his methods, and willingness to timely respond to subsequent questions.

Bankrupt Patriot Coal is being purchased in a $400 million deal led by Tom Clarke, a prominent Virginia-based environmentalist. Clarke will sell his coal at a 10 percent premium. And why would any cash-strapped utility pay 10 percent more for Clarke’s coal? The coal will come with a carbon credit certificate (also called a “carbon offset”) worth 30 percent of the coal’s emissions.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Act filings indicate that Soros has purchased an initial 1 million shares of Peabody Energy and 553,200 shares of Arch Coal, the two largest publicly traded U.S. coal companies. As pointed out last week, both companies have been driven perilously close to bankruptcy by the combination of President Obama’s “war on coal” and inexpensive natural gas brought on by the hydrofracturing revolution.

Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency issued rules under the guise of preventing global warming that supposedly will reduce coal-fired electricity in the U.S. by 32 percent. This action is on top of other Obama EPA rules that are already well on their way to shuttering another 20 percent of coal plants.

The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen, assigned to a global warming research mission in the Arctic, was called away from duty last week to help commercial ships navigate the unusually heavy ice in the Hudson Bay – a far cry from the scenario envisioned by Al Gore’s 2009 prediction that climate change would lead to an ice-free Arctic by 2014.

Published in the British Medical Journal by an international team of researchers, a study reports that: (1) consumption of one SSB per day increases the risk of type two diabetes by 18 percent; and that (2) about 2 million cases of diabetes over the next 10 years will be caused by SSBs. But the study is not based on original scientific research so much as it is statistical smoke-and-mirrors.